If, as is argued here, Menno's intensely personal polemic against David Joris in the Blasphemy of Jan van Leiden was continued in the Foundation Book of 1539-1540, it can be inferred that Menno's target audience for both tracts was the diffuse group of post-1538 Covenanters, whose predecessors Gellius Faber in 1552 identified as the "Tau people" who, in 1538, had threatened to hang preachers "who should have known better" in their own doorways.
Ultimately the importance of determining the date of composition of the Blasphemy of Jan van Leiden lies in the fact that the tract marks the end of the Munster movement within Dutch Anabaptism and the beginning of Menno's break with David Joris. The issue in post-1540 Dutch Anabaptism was not so much the repudiation of the sword--on this point both Menno and David Joris were agreed--but the degree to which the movement was to be spiritualized and withdrawn from the world.
To summarize: the form and substance of the 1627 "first printing" suggests that Menno composed it in two stages over the course of 1538 when, after the death of Batenburg, David Joris sought to recruit followers to his cause.
20:1) then leads to an unwarranted conclusion that, because this could not apply to Menno's situation in Witmarsum, the text of the Blasphemy is not directed against the historical Jan van Leyden, but against the "other Jan van Leyden," the lying Pashur, or David Joris.
"David Joris sonderbare Lebensbeschreibung aus einem Manuscripto" in Unparteusche Kitchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Frankfurt 1729: facsimile edn.
In any event, David Joris was known at this time to be making emblem books and was being chased for this by the Stadholder of Friesland when he took refuge in Groningen in January 1539.--Documenta Anabaptistica Necrlandica, I: Friesland en Groningen (1530-1550), ed.
Waite, The Anabaptist Writings of David joris (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1994), 264-267.
(89.) There is no possible way that Anneke Jansz would have described Jan van Batenburg, the great rival of David Joris, as either godly or the noblest of those satisfying God's pleasure.
According to Meihuizen, Menno had excised the term "Tau" from the Foundation Book because it was used by David Joris.--Meihuizen, Fundamcntboek, 136 note a.
That dream was taken up after the fall of Munster on June 25, 1535, above all by David Joris, leader of an Anabaptist congregation in Delft.